Nick & Charlotte's Art and Drawings

Main menu

Tag Archives: technical

One of the first things that I did when getting my set of drawing inks, was to make a colour chart. Although each ink comes with a sample picture, I felt that this might not reflect the ink as I actually use it, so made a chart showing all of the colours, seen in this post, above. To make the chart, and the newer one I talk about in a minute, I made a template in indesign and printed them on watercolour paper, for a good white base that would reflect the drawing papers I would normally be using.

This chart, however, was flawed in two ways; For a start, when I did this I did not understand the effect of having a high loading of ink on the brush – it effectively means the layers of ink are much thicker, and so much deeper. This is why the reds and oranges all ended up looking pretty much the same, and the yellow went a very strange colour. The second flaw is in relation to how I have since started using the inks – by diluting them down. This chart only shows full density of ink loads.

The old Dilutions Chart

I had a small interest in the very beginning of my ink endeavours about the possibility of drawing with diluted ink, so much so that I actually did make a dilutions chart at the time, but only for three of the colours (and out of them, only black I can remember explicitly). So, a new chart was in order.

The result that I came up with, is the chart below. It contains every ink that I own except the gold (which does not dilute well) from a range of pure ink to 1/64 dilution. The pure ink box for each colour is split into examples of a heavily loaded layer (top) and a light brushing layer (bottom). In addition to all the coloured inks, the black indian ink has a dilution factor down to 1/1024 – this is because of the extreme density of the ink, and I have found myself practically using 1/256 so far.

I am pretty proud of this chart, and feel it was well worth the multiple hours that it took to construct. It shall be useful in the future, I am sure!